At Liturgical Conference
Theologian Sounds Warning
Against Worshipping Church
CHICAGO — (NC) — “Catholics can
easily fall into a subtle form of idolatry” by
worshipping the Church, the keynote speaker
warned at the Chicago Liturgical Week here.
It is idolatry “to worship anyone — or any
thing — save God alone,” Father Frank Norris,
S.S., professor of systematic theology at St.
Patrick’s Seminary, Menlo Park, Calif., told a
capacity audience of 5,000.
Sponsored by the National Liturgical Con
ference, the Chicago Liturgical Week is the
third to be held this summer. Previous weeks
were held in Baltimore in June and in Port
land, Ore., in August.
“We do not worship the Church. We do
not worship her customs, her laws, her doc
trinal formulas or creeds. We do not worship
her liturgy, her sacraments — no, not even
the Mass itself. To do so would be idolatry.
Whatever may and must be said about our at
titude toward these sacred realities, we cannot
give to them the homage due to God alone,”
he said.
The nature of the Church, Father Norris
said, “is always a mixture of ‘already’ and ‘not
yet.’ ” It is already holy, he explained, but not
yet fully holy. It already correctly grasps and
proclaims Christ’s teaching, but it does not yet
grasp or proclaim it perfectly. Its worship is
already acceptable “in spirit and truth,” but
not yet perfect.
Because of this, he said, “it is not only pos
sible but mandatory for us to speak of the re
form of the Church. ... To be unwilling to face
up to a need for purification and reform where
it exists is to do a grave disservice to the
Church.”
THE CHURCH TODAY, he said, “sees more
clearly perhaps than ever before that God’s
saving plan is broader and more extensive than
her own visible boundaries. The plan of salva
tion is all-embracing and is not restricted by
the necessary human limitations of the visible
structure of the Church.”
Urban parish life “is often isolationist, di
visive, and self-serving,” another speaker
charged, saying that such parishes are “already
dead.”
Father John Harmon, associate director of
Packard Manse, Roxbury, Mass., said a parish’s
vitality is determined by “the degree to which
the parish corresponds to the unalterable shape
of the life God has given us.”
“Underneath all our disloyalties, our divid
edness, and our violence is this one people that
God has made, however we describe it theolog
ically,” Father Harmon said, and “when pa
rochial life is lived in obedience to Him it is
necessarily a life in common, in communion, a
network of mutuality with all men and all life.”
He added: “It is remarkable that in so
many ways our parishes exist as though we
can avoid this common life with our brother
. .. and still be loyal to God and fulfill our free
numanuy.
The “persistent malady of the Christian,”
he said, is a “schizophrenic mentality” that
separates life into worldly and unworldly fields
of endeavor. “To break this unnatural Church
world dichotomy,” he said the parish must al
ways be seen “as inevitably in and of the world,
and the world ... as inevitably in and of the
parish.”
For a time, he said, it would be good to
“speak of the parish as secular and worldly,
and speak of the world as religious and spirit
ual.”
The parish ought not, he said, aim at
“eventually bridging the gap” between Church
and world, but should recognize “the non-ex
istence of the gap in the essential structure of
reality.”
The “deadliness” of the parish is not only
due to the false separation of Church and
world, he continued, but also to the failure to
admit what he called “sickness”: “we don’t
understand the graceful necessity of openly
confessing our sicknesses ... if we are to
grow.”
CHRISTIANS typically tend to suppose, he
said, “that we have something good to give
others ‘outside,’ while what they have to give
us is negligible.”
The give-and-take which the parish ought
to develop in its community should not be “a
parish program,” he said, but rather one “in
which some of the people of the parish are
working with others who are not of the parish
around a common need in the community . . .
without any prior determination of who is to
give and who is to receive, so that whatever
good emerges is shared.”
He called the separation of churches “the
most incongruous and shocking (separation) of
all.” It is “perhaps understandable” that we
separate ourselves from the pains and sickness
of the world, “but how — sharing baptism,
Bible, much belief and common tradition —
do we explain our life, apart from the brother
in Christ?”
The answer, he said, is that “we still actu
ally think we can carry on a valid Church life
in our present separated structures.” But the
freedom to “postpone to some ecumenically
sublime future” the present need for union is
not ours, he said, and “either we develop a life
together — which we are absolutely free to do
since the basic unity has already been created
— or we continue to live out a form of death.”
At the closing session, Thomas Klise, a
writer and editor, said: “Catholics show no
more sense of mission than anyone else.” He
called religious education “the villian of the
piece” that prevents “applying the Gospel mes
sage of justice and mercy to the problems of
the contemporary social order.”
“After so many years of ‘What does it
profit a man?’ and ‘Seek first the kingdom of
God,’ the impression is gained that the whole
idea of being in this vale of tears is to get out
of it safely.
“The result,” he added, “is not an Incar
national Christian but a Manichee, who thinks
of this world as his natural enemy, who is
distrustful of secular man and his achievements,
who tends to cultivate in the name of piety a
resolute detachment from the very things that
ought to be his natural and most important
concerns.
“And this vice of other-worldliness is so
entrenched that even when witness becomes an
evident moral imperative, instinct will betray
it and habit confound it, and the frazzled
prophet — what will he do? He will found a
study club.”
“Secularity is no handicap” to the mission
of the Christian but is rather “its pride and
glory, its distinctive and characteristic note,’*1
he said. Because this secularity “is the special,
not to say exclusive, possession of the layman,”
those clergy who abandon their “higher role”
risk “compromising the judgment of their high
er office.”
THE CONSTITUTION on the Church, he
said, freed the layman from imitating the
priesthood. “In telling us that the fundamental
task of the layman consists in temporal en
gagement,” the Church is urging laymen to
present “an incorruptible truthfulness to the
world.” .
CITY MARKET
10 Biltmore Avenue
Phone AL4-7274
Asheville,
North Carolina
COMPLIMENTS
GUY M. BEATY
and
COMPANY
520 South Elliot St.
Charlotte,
North Carolina
'wflV COMPLETE
EYEGLASS SERVICE
Htdgmuyi
OPTICIANS, Im.
Raleigh—Greenville
Greensboro—Charlotte
PLEDGE TO AID SOCIAL JUSTICE
Hong Kong — (NC) — A pact to support and promote *
economic justice among the peoples and governments of Asia <
entered into here by 150 priests from 15 Asian nations. This cane
at the conclusion of the month-long Priests’ Institute for 8«a
Action in Asia.
The (Aug. 29) resolution — to be carried out through teach
ing in schools and parishes, organizations among youth, i«w
farmers, teachers and managers, and overall influence in uJ
communities — cited the need of many millions in Asia “of m*,
and better food, houses, education and medical care . . .» ^
pledged among other points:
• To foster cooperation toward a truly human sodo-ect
nomic order in which freedom, social justice, full employment aai
effective government will flourish.
• To promote socially adapted industrialization.
• To strengthen agriculture.
• To help organize efforts of farmers, workers, managers ait
citizens.
• To promote systems of self-help, such as credit unions, c*
operatives, trade unions and professional groups.
One Hundred Enrolled
In School of Nursing
One hundred students have been
enrolled for the 1965-66 academic
year at the Mercy School of Nurs
ing in Charlotte, N.C.
Applications for the freshman
class numbered 75, but only 48
were able to be enrolled. Three
students were accepted as transfer
upperclassmen.
At the general assembly marking
the beginning of the new term Miss
Paula Moore, of Durham, N.C., was
presented the award given annual
ly to the freshman with the high
est average by the Mecklenburg
County Medical Auxiliary.
J. R. Sprung
DISTRIBUTION MANAGEMENT
SERVICE
Freight Bill Audit Service
Murphy, N.C.
PATRONIZE OUR
ADVERTISERS
Check Protectors — Check Writers
F fir E Checkwriter Co.
J. N. KERNS
Phone Edison 4-6704 138 Brevard Court
Charlotte, North Carolina
MYERS OIL COMPANY
Fill Up for Summer Delivery
Metered Delivery — Prompt Delivery
PHONE 873-4388
Statesville, North Carolina
U POINTE CHEVROLET
SINCE 1925
CAROLINA’S LARGEST DEALER
Dial ED 2-3131
531 East Trade St.
Opposite the Courthouse
Charlotte, North Carolina